This isn’t the first time Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken out about how his family’s past and the relationship with slavery in Barbados affected him. However, now in addition to affecting your conscience, it can also cost you your wallet. Is this the smallest republic in the world, Independent since 2021He wants to prosecute all the descendants of the owners of the cotton and sugar plantations.
according to British newspaper The telegraphThe actor’s family ran a sugar plantation that used slave labor on that Caribbean island, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For 396 years, Barbados was under the tutelage of the British monarchy, until its independence.
Now, the country seeks to restore justice and receive compensation through slavery – Commandment Which is manifested in all the countries of the Caribbean. When Barbados became a republic, then-Prince Carlos condemned the “terrible atrocities that were slavery,” but he made no mention of the issue of reparations, which incidentally overshadowed, Prince William’s visit to the islands. Then the new state was created Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration Dedicated to the study and implementation of compensation.
Led by Secretary General David Denny, the movement called on all countries in the region to unite, and it was Barbados that took the first step. In an interview with the British daily, he defended: “We should demand compensation from all the descendants of the plantation owners who profited from the slave trade, including the Cumberbatch family.”
The compensation money that Benedict Cumberbatch would pay, like many other Britons, should be used for “Transforming local clinics into hospitals, supporting schools, improving infrastructure and life in the country“.
The British actor has previously said publicly how the family’s past affects him and defended that, through the artwork, he sought to draw attention to the atrocities committed in those centuries of slavery. In 2013, he gave life to a farm owner in New Orleans, in the United States, at Award winning movie 12 years a slave.
Prior to that, in 2006, he starred in the movie Amazing grace It tells the story of British MP William Wilberforce’s struggle to stop the slave trade in the eighteenth century, and later to abolish slavery. in an interview to me Watchman in 2014Benedict Cumberbatch revealed that, early in his career, his mother suggested he change his last name to avoid talking about the family’s past with slavery.
The actor’s ancestor, Joshua Cumberbatch, bought a sugar plantation in Cleland, in southern Barbados, in 1728. The telegraph that they would have 250 slaves. The land has been in the hands of the family for nearly a century.
When slavery was abolished in 1834, the British government awarded compensation to those who lost their lands and sources of income in the Caribbean. It was the case of the Cumberbatch family that received six thousand pounds (about 6,800 euros), a value that is converted to today would be one million, according to the accounts of the English newspaper.
But Cumberbatch is not the only one targeted by the Barbados government. Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Drax, I applied Watchman, Recently in the Caribbean to meet with Prime Minister Mia Motley, trying to reach an agreement on the amount of compensation. The outcome of the meeting is not known yet.
The Drax family was one of the pioneers of the sugarcane plantation system in the 17th century and played an important role in the development of the slave trade system between the Caribbean and the United States.
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